Uploaded byAnthony Brown
Kanban Primer
The document presents an overview of Kanban, a visual workflow management method derived from the Toyota Production System, emphasizing the importance of limiting work in progress and improving efficiency in teams. It discusses principles such as visualization, analyzing workflow, and minimizing context-switching to enhance performance. Key concepts include cycle times, bottlenecks, and flexible methodologies for adapting Kanban to specific team needs.
Kanban Primer
- 1. kanbanAnthony Brown Director,Solutions Consulting Overview for Analytics and Services teams
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- 3. 51 In order tovisualize work, we need to understand how work works. visualization Kanban, means visual board in Japanese.
- 4. Kanban was created withinthe Toyota Production System (TPS) by Taichi Ohno and is what we refer to in the US as “Lean”. The two TPS pillars are “just-in-time” or JIT automation and autonomation via human interface. When combined these two pillars form kanban.
- 5. Principles Plan Visualize Workflow Limit Work-in-progress Analyze,Improve Kanban is predicated by limiting the work in progress, and only pulling work from a queue once work is complete. Traditional project management promotes moving large volumes of work between groups, whereas lean or kanban promote limiting the amount of work in progress and completing small amounts. This allows teams to really understand their work and remove waste or non-valued tasks.
- 6. Time is money. Ifwe can deliver faster to customers, they are able to harvest the benefits of our work and can pay us sooner to keep doing what we are, and what our competitors are not doing.
- 7. Cycle Time = Ifyou have an average completion rate of 1 feature per week and we have 3 features in progress we get a cycle time of 3- weeks per feature. If instead we are working on 1 features at a time, we get a cycle time of 1 week per feature. Little’s Law work in progress average completion rate Queueing theory: The more that is in process, the longer the cycle time.
- 8. This effect iseven worsened with knowledge work because of context-switching. Context-switching 20% of time is lost in context switching between tasks. Fewer tasks means less time lost.
- 9. Kanban: The BasicIdea Unlike Scrum, Kanban is not a ‘design upfront’ method and can be deployed very generically to work with Scrum teams, operations and service teams. To-do 16 Doing Done
- 10. Flexible Methodology Kanban isintended to evolve over time. Perhaps we want to increase visualization and workflow by breaking down tasks into smaller sizes increasing flow To-do 16 Doing DoneAnalyze - what’s included? - how should it be solved? - break down into task - etc.
- 11. Flexible Methodology To-do 16 Doing DoneAnalyze Oneway to handle hand-offs or pulls is to create queues to buffer work. You can also introduce specialized swim lanes for specific types of work or resources Doing Done Product Services
- 12. Flexible Methodology Assuming wehave a representative board, we now need to establish limits. Unlike current convention, the lower the number the more mature the team. To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test
- 13. Work-in-Progress Limits We aregoing to place constraints in all of the ‘doing’ status columns allowing 2-points per person. To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test ( )2 = 10 4 24WIP
- 14. Bottlenecks Let’s load theboard with cards and ask a couple of questions: To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test 4 24WIP 1. Where is the bottleneck? 2. How many cards can the engineering take currently? 3. How would you improve the flow of the current cards?
- 15. Starvation Dev has noactive work or ability to pull from analyze creating starvation. To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test 4 24WIP This can be prevented looking at leading indicators.
- 16. Bugs A Customer Servicerequest turns into a bug, what do we do? Is it an emergency, can it wait? To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test 4 24WIP
- 17. Emergencies A Customer hasan urgent request, that cannot wait, what do we do? To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test 4 24WIP !
- 18. Differing Items Work comesin different shapes, sizes and scope. How do we work with this? To-do 16 Dev DoneAnalyze Doing Done Product Services Doing Done Test 4 24WIP
- 19. Metrics: Weekly ProgressExample Sources 14 Basecamp 01. ALL / IN-PROGRESS TASKS Removed sensitive project data Removed sensitive project data 02. WORK Done 61 In Progress 13 Validation 2 All Tasks Urgent 1 Default 4 CMR 10 In-progress 0 30 60 90 120 2014-04-09 2014-04-12 2014-04-15 2014-04-18 2014-04-21 2014-04-24 2014-04-27 2014-04-30 2014-05-03 PROJECT STATUS = GREEN 4.5AVG DAYS PER TASK
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- 21. Dissecting a Burn-downChart Sources 14 Basecamp 0 30 60 90 120 2014-04-09 2014-04-12 2014-04-15 2014-04-18 2014-04-21 2014-04-24 2014-04-27 2014-04-30 2014-05-03 Cycle Time Lead Time NewTasks Backlog WIP Remainder
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